


200

by TomlinSpidey



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Dystopian, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 21:05:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2124675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomlinSpidey/pseuds/TomlinSpidey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The government decided communication was lost, so they gave us only 200 words a day. Harry is just a boy, and witnesses the cruelty through wondering eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	200

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so I wrote this for my coursework at college as the beginning of a story. I'm not promising there will ever be anything added to it but I wanted to share, so... Here you go, hope you like it.

The government decided that communication was lost.  
Real communication, that is. The kind we divulge through eyes and hands and the connection of souls. The digital age executed this, and so the government set a limit. 200 words a day would have to suffice for such a disconnected nation.  
They started with the oldest, people born in this year in September, this year in August, this year, that year. Throngs of nervous people queuing outside the centres they set up specially for the occasion. Single file, straight and long, watching people emerge and shake their heads, new additions to their very systems making it too painful to warn them to run.  
By the time Harry was born, it was just the done thing; your baby was born, taken to get flu shots and weighed, a microchip painstakingly installed into their arm - what the doctors and scientists described as a ‘deadbolt’ in their throats. Harry’s mother never told him, but he imagines he cried, and he imagines it broke his mother’s heart.  
The new system, of course, meant changes. How could we possibly adapt to a world where reading aloud was a terrible waste and even singing was brutally cut off mid-note? How could we teach the children what the world was, why it had to be this way, without lecture halls and the raising of hands and voices?  
We seemed to move backward, in some ways: silent movies and writing letters. All phones, computers, any technological method of communication was destroyed. All this could be construed as greatly romantic, as a triumph in the face of computerised takeover.  
But it came with a price.  
We lost such beautiful things. Plays would never work if the actors could not speak. Singing ceased to be a thing of comfort. So many arts and so many creative things were snatched away from us. We were left without freedom of speech, without any freedom at all, mindless drones left with nothing but 200 words in which to praise what a good idea this was. Whatever we thought.  
Harry can remember the first time it happened. He was five. His mother was reading him a story, one about a boy who never grew up, about pirates and fairies and adventure, when suddenly she just stopped. Her lips continued to move, her eyes following the words upon the page, but no sound emerged. When she realised this, she flipped the book closed and set it on the table. She looked into her son’s wide eyes and left the room. Harry remembers wondering why she didn’t say goodnight.  
He had, of course, always wondered why everyone was the same. Why everyone wore the bland colours of their chosen sector of work, why everyone looked so grey and so, so tired. He had thought, in the way that children do, that it was all a part of growing up; not being different anymore, and having to be the same.  
Harry didn’t want to be the same.  
The government had other ideas.  
Harry entered the education system – uniforms and tests and no more stories. They were taught with synthetic colours on huge projector screens, teachers tapping silently with threatening looking rods, laser-pointers shining harshly in your eyes when it was your turn to answer a question. Some words, these children would never learn to pronounce.  
It was supposed to be a beautiful thing, the government insisted. We were supposed to become closer, to communicate with love and touch. According to the papers, we ruined that with our constant need for chatter and mindlessness. So they took complete control.  
Harry’s favourite lesson was music. By the time he was nine, they removed it from the curriculum. Instruments were burned in huge pyres in the streets. Musicians were advised to join another sector and not to pursue their chosen line of work.  
Harry was eleven, starting high school, when it happened.  
There was a boy in one of his new classes. His name was Louis, skinny and happy and forever running out of words. Harry remained quiet in classes, letting it all wash over him in the passive way that was now expected of students. Louis did not.  
It was entirely fascinating, Harry thought, when Louis’ most intimate thoughts would spew from his mouth and into the world. The educators did not agree with him, and they began to talk. They said that Louis was a problem. They labelled him with Tourettes Syndrome, but Harry knew this was a lie. Tourettes died out years ago, sufferers undergoing painful tests and experiments to eradicate the ‘disease of the mouth’. Louis could not possibly suffer from such an affliction.  
But Tourettes was the excuse given when Louis stopped coming to school.  
The other children talked, as children do. The conspiracies they came up with! But it was Harry who found out the truth.  
Louis’ mother sat outside of the front office and cried, and Harry watched from behind the cabinet as Louis was dragged away, mouth moving as if streaming all sorts of barbaric profanities, but he was clearly out of both words and time. Before they loaded him into the large, unmarked van parked inconspicuously at the back entrance to the school, Harry ran out.  
“Stop!” He yelled, his sixth word of the day. “Stop it! He’s just different!” Eleven.  
The man holding open the doors looked at Harry, something like sympathy on his face. His eyes were tired, and he refused to watch as Louis kicked and struggled. “In a world like this, you don’t want to be different.” He said. Again, eleven words, wasted on a stranger.  
“I don’t want to be the same, either.” Harry insisted, stony authority clear even in his pre-pubescent voice. Louis stopped, and right before they loaded him in, he mouthed something to Harry, something Harry remembers to this day. That eleven year old boy, eyes wide with fear and voice box empty of all vibration, stuck with Harry until now, his lips forever moving in his memory.  
Sector Thirty-Two.


End file.
